CSLearning4U

Providing CS Learning to High School Teachers and Others, Ubiquitously

A key idea in CSLearning4U is that we can design CS learning opportunities. Simply wrestling an interpreter or compiler can't be the best way to learn about computer science. Throwing people into the deep end of the pool can teach people to swim, but there are better ways. We want to do better than a book for CS learning, and we want to design the phonics of computing education to integrate with the "whole language learning" of programming.

We are pleased to make available our teacher and student eBook for learning Python and Computer Science Principles!

The student CSP ebook is available at interactivepython.org/runestone/static/StudentCSP. It doesnít require a login, but we recommend that teachers have their students login. Without a login, we store saved answers on the local computer, but if the student logs in, we save the answers by the studentís username. The course name is StudentCSP.

We recommend that teachers create a custom version of the student ebook for your students. This allows teachers to customize the ebook, assign homework, and view studentís progress, and even create additional assessments for students.

Teachers, please contact us at cslearn4u@gmail.com with the name and location of your school, and weíll send you the URL.

We are creating a new distance-learning medium for computing education especially for in-service high school teachers based on ideas from instructional design and educational psychology. In-service high school teachers are particularly time-constrained (and thus need efficiency) and they are more metacognitively aware than other students (and thus able to better inform the project design). The new medium will combine multiple modalities, worked examples, and structure based on cognitive models of designers' knowledge. The research questions are that (1) the teachers will learn CS knowledge in the on-line setting, (2) the teachers will be more efficient at programming tasks, and (3) the teachers will find the materials useful and satisfying. Because of its focus on teachers, the project can potentially have broad impact, in particular on the strategies for training the 10,000 teachers envisioned in the CS 10K Project. The project will establish models and design guidelines that can be used for the creation of other learning materials, including materials for students in, for example, the proposed new CS Principles AP course.

The proposed seed grant is focused on creating examples of computer science instruction that are informed by modern educational psychology. In so doing, we hope to create a kernel for growing a research program and providing a set of papers that connect the computing education research community to new ideas in education, psychology, and learning sciences.

Briana B. Morrison. 2013. Using cognitive load theory to improve the efficiency of learning to program. In Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research (ICER '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 183-184. DOI=10.1145/2493394.2493425 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2493394.2493425